Tra pragma della violenza e redenzione del mondo. Forme di violenza rivoluzionaria in Max Weber

Abstract

Weber refers to violence as the specific means of politics: as such it plays an important role in the state-building process. However it is possible to find in Weber’s work some references to other forms of violence, i.e. forms of revolutionary violence. They emerge at the points of contact and conflict between ethics and politics. In particular, they arise when the “pragma of violence” is no longer recognized as a permanent worldly quality and when the strive for world’s redemption proper to religious ethics finds in violence its form of expression. The aim of this paper is to identify four forms of revolutionary violence – anomic, ascetic, testimonial and ultimate ends violence – and, by outlining their specific features, to enrich the weberian framework on violence, thereby showing the variety of subjective pathways that are at the origin of a violent act.